After several years of nail-biting delays and breakdowns, the Large Hadron Collider, one of the few science experiments to become a household name, got underway in March of 2010. The search for the Higgs boson, the elusive God particle that would resolve several problems in the Standard Model of particle physics, was front-page news.

But in the last 18 months, as the LHC has scanned through various energies, the Higgs has not showed itself. And at a conference in Mumbai on August 22, CERN scientists revealed news that set the physics community humming: in the energies so far explored, theres a 95% probability that the Higgs doesnt exist. Amir Azcel, writing in a guest blog at Scientific American, explains these numbers, considers the tumult in particle physics that will occur should the Higgs prove no more than theoretical, and asks whether Stephen Hawking has just won his infamous bet against the Higgs:

A few years ago, celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking was widely reported in the press to have placed a provocative public bet that the LHC (along with all particle accelerators that preceded it) would never find the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle believed responsible for having imbued massive particles with their mass when the universe was very young.

Granny says dey gonna blow the world up...CERN scientists narrow search for Higgs bosonFri, Nov 25, 2011 - CERN physicists have moved the focus of their search for the Higgs boson, the particle many think gave the universe form after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, to a narrow band on the mass spectrum, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

And science bloggers close to the research center are suggesting it might be clear by the middle of next month that the boson is a chimera and some other mechanism to explain how matter changed to mass at the birth of the cosmos will have to be sought. The higher mass region has now been virtually ruled out, but the Higgs it could still be anywhere in the lower 114-141GeV [giga-electron-volts] range, said James Gillies of CERN, the 21-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland. Physicists such as Italian Tomasso Dorigo, who works with CERN, now say that  if it exists  the Higgs should be found at around 120GeV (A Quantum Diaries Survivor), while independent British researcher Philip Gibbs goes for 140GeV on his site, viXra.org open e-Print archive.

GeV is a term used in physics to quantify particle energy fields. Searches for the Higgs in CERNs Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the now-closed Tevatron at the US Fermilab have ranged up to 476GeV. Results from analysis up to the end of June in the LHC, which smashes together millions of particles per second at a tiny fraction under the speed of light, were presented at a conference in Paris last week. However, these slipped by almost unnoticed even by many specialists in the particle physics community, which has been more focused recently on an Italian research centers claim to have recorded neutrino particles moving faster than light. The latest Higgs findings were compiled jointly by two usually competing LHC research teams  ATLAS and CMS  and Gillies said both were working hard to try to complete analysis of data from the collider gathered up to the start of this month.

CERNs ruling council meets from Dec. 12 to Dec. 16 and any concrete sign of the Higgs  whose existence was postulated four decades ago by British scientist Peter Higgs  would be reported during that session. However, CERN physicist and blogger Pauline Gagnon said on Wednesday that the low mass range, where scientists had always thought they would find the particle, was also the one where it would be more difficult to see. The Higgs, she said, is playing hard to catch."(Quantum Diaries) It might be that it does not even exist, she said, a possibility already raised by other researchers and by CERN chief Rolf Heuer.

The particle is part of the 30-year-old Standard Model of particle physics that seeks to explain how the universe works at its most basic level, but it is almost the only element of the model whose existence had not yet been proven. If it is not found, Gagnon said, we need to move on to explore the next set of possibilities. One suggestion came this week from a self-proclaimed non-scientist in a comment on the Quantum Diaries blog. It will be in essence ethereal, kind of like a spirit being, existing for the purpose of holding everything together, he wrote.

If we retained that mentality throughout the ages we'd have no technological advancement.

Do you have any idea how much seemingly intangible research has benefited mankind, and all of the industries it has created?

Quantum Physics is one such field. We would be nowhere near where we are today as a technologically advanced species if it were not for scientists studying in fields that people couldn't imagine the worth of on a practical level.

Tevatron still revealing particle physics info...Idled Atom-Smasher Yielding Data Months After ShutdownDecember 01, 2011 - The Tevatron Accelerator at the U.S. government's Fermi National Laboratory in suburban Chicago once led the world in studying what happens when subatomic particles are thrown together at nearly the speed of light. But CERNs new Large Hadron Collider in Europe has taken the lead in this exotic science. U.S. officials took the aging Tevatron Accelerator offline in September, ending a 30-year career in particle physics.

Since it went online in 1983, Fermilabs Tevatron Accelerator fueled the study of the most fundamental building blocks of matter - sub atomic particles. But one particle continues to elude scientists -- the Higgs Boson. We know a lot about where its not, but we dont know where it is yet, said Robert Roser is a senior scientist at Fermilab who has spent much of his career looking for the so-called God particle which could help scientists better understand why matter has mass. If I look at our data right now... its not jumping out at us, Roser said. Theres a chance the Higgs Boson will never jump out at Roser and other scientists who have been hunting it for more than 20 years.

With the Tevatron now offline, the search for the Higgs is underway at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, at the CERN laboratory in Geneva Switzerland. The LHC is now the worlds most advanced particle accelerator, but Roser says even it cant find the Higgs Boson. The fact that the LHC has ruled out the higher mass states makes the Tevatron that much more attractive at the moment, because were good at where the remaining territory is left, Roser said. That remaining territory is the last frontier of research for the Tevatron, despite the fact it is not operational.

Scientists are still analyzing the massive amounts of data the accelerator produced just before its shutdown. We hope to have the Higgs (Boson) analysis completed and ready for public consumption by February or March of 2012, Roser said. But the final analysis could ultimately lead to the conclusion the Higgs Boson does not exist. Not finding the Higgs is to some peoples way of thinking a lot more exciting, said physicist Patrick Fox. He says the absence of the Higgs particle could challenge current ideas about matter and mass.

Finding the Higgs would be great it would be really great to find the last piece of this puzzle. Not finding the Higgs would actually result in us probably finding a lot more complicated stuff instead of the Higgs which would be very interesting to us to find new forces of nature, new symmetries of nature, new dimensions of space these are all possibilities where you may or may not have a Higgs Boson but instead have something more exotic, Fox said. Scientists at Fermilab say the discovery of nothing at all could be the greatest discovery, and the lasting legacy, of the Tevatron Accelerator.

Granny wonderin' who lost it?...Have scientists at the LHC found the Higgs or not?12 December 2011 - Could this be the moment that physicists know in their hearts they have found the Higgs particle?

The discovery of the Higgs Boson would undoubtedly be the biggest scientific breakthrough of the century so far. Arguably, it would be the most important discovery since Crick and Watson worked out the structure of DNA nearly 60 years ago. On Tuesday, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will say how close they are when they present the results from two of the experiments searching for the Higgs. One thing is for sure, the researchers won't have all the data they need to make a definitive statement that they have discovered the sub-atomic particle. But in the best-case scenario they may come very close.

Indeed, they may privately feel "in their bones" that they have found it but be unable to call it a discovery publicly. The Higgs is a sub-atomic particle responsible for giving all other particles their mass. It is therefore crucial to our understanding of the Universe. There are two experiments, or "detectors", searching for the Higgs in completely separate ways: the Atlas and the CMS collaborations. Each is looking for a signal of its presence among the billions of collisions that are occurring in each detector. In graphical form it would look like a little spike in the data.

Jump for joy

At this stage, any spike they may see could be a statistical anomaly and disappear in time as more data is gathered in the next run of collisions which starts in the new year. That is why no one will want to say they have discovered the Higgs at this stage, even if they do find an enticing spike on their graphs. By early March, they will have enough data to know for sure whether the Higgs exists or not, and that is when the discovery or non-discovery will be official. But there is a big "but". If on Tuesday both experiments find a big spike, each of them in exactly the same place and in the place that they expected to find the Higgs, the temptation for even the most dispassionate physicist to jump for joy will be irresistible. In this scenario, Prof Rolf Heuer, the head of Cern (the organisation that runs the LHC), will still be duty-bound to say that this is not a definitive discovery. It cost billions of pounds to build - what if it doesn't find the Higgs?

He is likely to say that we may have very strong hints of the Higgs, and that he hopes these will be confirmed in 2012. But Prof Heuer and his colleagues cannot make any stronger public statement, just in case those peaks become smaller as the next run of collisions begins. But there are two other scenarios. It is possible that neither experiment has detected any signal across the range where the Higgs is expected to be found. This too is incredibly interesting; far more interesting to physicists than finding the Higgs, in fact. This would again provide a very, very strong indication that the Higgs as predicted by the current so-called Standard Model of physics does not exist. Again, LHC scientists would not be able to rule it out for sure - but in their hearts they will know that in a few months' time they will have made a discovery that will have consigned a very important part of our current theory of particle physics to the dustbin.

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